No on/off switch to conserve battery life. Finger navigation mouse can be difficult.

Bottom Line

The HP Wireless Mini Keyboard is an inexpensive typing and navigating solution for your home entertainment PC. Its innovative mouse solution and almost full-size keyboard will delight those that don't quite want to commit to a thumbpad solution just yet.

So you have your new home theater PC (HTPC) set up in your living room, but you have no keyboard to navigate it with? The HP Wireless Mini Keyboard ($59.99 list) is smallas small as a netbook keyboardthe keys are half-sized, but manageable if your needs are just navigating the Web, watching videos, and consuming media. Its wireless USB dongle has a special feature called "Link-5" that allows you to pair up to five other HP devices to one USB receiver. Its features are thoughtful and design is simple but in an "Apple" kind of waya welcome sight compared with the other home entertainment keyboards out there.

Design
The HP Wireless Mini Keyboard is plastic, but it has a black soft-touch matte frame that leaves its chassis free of fingerprints and smudge marks. Its compact structure measures 0.8 by 10.5 by 4.8 inches (HWD), not big enough for a full-size keyboardhence its name. The chiclet keys are sized down to fit the frame and the right Shift key is halved to squeeze in the arrow keys.

In the top right and left corner of the keyboard are two buttons that are part of the integrated mouse. The right button is a small glossy nub in texture and acts as a touch navigation function: it looks like a Lenovo laptop pointing stick, but you navigate like it's a touchpad. Even though it's a small space to work with navigatingfor what I needed, I found I had no trouble with it. I would have preferred if it had a more textured or matte finish, as your finger tends to rub rather than glide across the optical finger navigation. When you want to right-click, you also do so on this button. The left button has a matte finish and acts as the left-click mouse button. Although it's not as optimal a navigating experience as say with a mouse or touchpad, it's a smart and unique way to integrate a "mouse" into a compact form factor.

The HP Mini Keyboard comes with a row of dedicated hot-key functions. Pressing Ctrl + anything from F1 to F11 will launch a program or execute a function. There's a key that will launch your dedicated Web browser, put your computer to sleep, lock your PC, allow you to skip forward or backward through a song on iTunes or a movie, play/ pause or stop your media, and even adjust the volume or mute it altogether.

Features
The HP Mini Keyboard connects via a USB receiver that plugs into your PC and sends signals over a 2.4GHz frequency. This USB receiver also has a special feature tacked on: It can sync with up to five other HP devices at a time via Link-5 technologythis concept is not unlike Logitech's own Unifying receivers. But without any other HP devices to test with, I can't say how easy (or hard) it is to pair other devices to the USB dongle. HP is introducing a series of keyboards and mice with the Link-5 technology.

There's no on/off switch to help save on battery life (two AA batteries included). However, in the battery compartment, there's a place to store the wireless USB dongle for when you're on the go.

For a netbook-size keyboard, the typing experience was solid (I wrote this whole review with the Mini Wireless Keyboard). I wouldn't recommend using it as your primary keyboard, but for consuming media and occasionally typing in a few characters to update your Twitter status it will provide. For a better keyboard experience the Logitech diNovo Mini (4.5 stars) is second to none. With a smartphone-like thumb-typing experience, it's the best keyboard to complement our home entertainment PC. It offers Bluetooth connectivity and USB wireless connectivity, not to mention the navigation experience is much smoother. However, its $149 price tag will frighten most users away. At $59, the HP Wireless Mini Keyboard will work just fine.

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